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The Nuremberg Trials

Submitted by Jason McDonald on Sat, 2014-07-19 01:45

Untitled Document

The scope and size of the German genocide against Jews, gypsies, communists, intellectuals, homosexuals and Slavs shocked the world even before the end of World War II. At every major conference starting in Teheran, Iran in 1943, the Allies pledged to prosecute those responsible for war crimes.

With the end of the war, the liberation of concentration camps and the meticulous Nazi record keeping gave the Allies plenty of evidence. In London in August 1945, the International Military Tribunal (IMT) was formed to exact justice for the victims of Nazi aggression.

The Soviets wanted the trials to be held in Berlin, but due to bomb damage, it was agreed to hold the trials in Nuremberg, Germany. A large court facility with a jail was little damaged by the war. The trials convened on October 18, 1945, with evidence being heard first. Each of the four powers, France, England, the United States and the Soviet Union, sent one judge and one alternate. Prosecutors also came from the Four Powers. The court rules were based on Anglo-American legal procedures.

The court investigated and indicted twenty-four “major war criminals” and against six “criminal organizations.” The organizations were Hitler's Cabinet, the Nazi party, the SS, SD, the Gestapo, the SA and the General Staff and High Command of the Wehrmacht.

The defendants were indicted on November 20, 1945, on four counts: conspiracy to commit crimes against peace; planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression; war crimes; and crimes against humanity.

The defendants were Nazi leaders that were still surviving. Only Martin Bormann's whereabouts was unknown; his body was found in 1972 in a Berlin sewer. Goering especially was recalcitrant; he angrily argued with the court. Most of the defendants did not speak. Lawyers from the four powers were appointed as defendants. 236 live witnesses, photographs and film of the concentration camps, and testimony from 124 other people were submitted. Some of the observers, most of whom had never seen the film of the concentration camps, were moved to tears. In alphabetical order, the defendants were:

Reichsmarschall, Commander of the Luftwaffe 1935–45, Chief of the 4-Year Plan 1936–45, and original head of the Gestapo before turning it over to the SS in April 1934. Originally the second-highest-ranked member of the Nazi Party and Hitler's designated successor, he fell out of favor with Hitler in April 1945. Highest ranking Nazi official to be tried at Nuremberg. As Prussian Minister for Internal Affairs he created the Secret Police, which later developed into the Gestapo. He was responsible for the mobilization of the economic resources of the Reich for rearmament. Head of the Luftwaffe.

as Indicted and found guilty on all four counts, he was sentenced to death. On the night before his execution, he committed suicide by taking cyanide of potassium. The source of the poison is not entirely clear

Wehrmacht General and advisor of Hitler in strategic and operative matters. Keitel's subordinate and Chief of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW)'s Operations Division 1938–45. Signed orders for the summary execution of Allied commandos and Soviet commissars. Signed the instruments of unconditional surrender on 7 May 1945 in Reims as the representative of Karl Dönitz.

The condemned were hanged on October 16, 1946. Their bodies were taken to Dachau, where the ovens that had consumed so many were fed for the last time with the bodies of the men that had built them. The ashes were scattered over the Isar River. The sentence of imprisonment was carried out at Berlin's Spandau prison, which was entirely populated by Nazis. The last prisoner, Rudolph Hess, committed suicide in 1987.

After the International Military Tribunal, at Nuremberg and elsewhere, the four powers tried and convicted thousands of Nazis all over Germany. They would try Nazis separately, not as an international court. In trials that lasted from 1947 through 1949, the US Military held twelve trials at Nuremberg that investigated Nazi lawyers, doctors, industrialists, and others that directly or indirectly committed war crimes. Thousands of Germans were thrown out of civil service. New governments were set up in both East and West Germany, supporting either the western Allies or the Soviets.

Throughout this time, Europe dealt with the consequences of World War II. Displaced Persons, or DPs, were on the march everywhere, trying to get home or trying to get out. The wartime alliance of the Soviet Union and the western Allies was beginning to crumble, and a new, low-intensity conflict called the Cold War was beginning, unbeknownst to average citizens of the East and West.